There’s a major upheaval going on in Iran, but the western media seem to be incapable of covering it with any depth — or in far too many cases, at all — even though it’s exactly the sort of thing they used to be very interested in. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Tahmineh Dehbozorgi provides useful context:
The Western liberal media is ignoring the Iranian uprising because explaining it would force an admission it is desperate to avoid: the Iranian people are rebelling against Islam itself, and that fact shatters the moral framework through which these institutions understand the world.
Ideally, to cover an uprising is not just to show crowds and slogans. It requires answering a basic question: why are people risking death? In Iran, the answer is simple and unavoidable. The people are rising up because the Islamic Republic of Iran has spent decades suffocating every aspect of life — speech, work, family, art, women, and economic survival — under a clerical system that treats liberty as a crime. There is no way to tell that story without confronting the nature of the regime.
Western media refuses to do so because it has fundamentally misunderstood Islam. Or worse, it has chosen not to understand it.
Islam, in Western progressive discourse, has been racialized. It is treated not as a belief system or a political ideology, but as a stand-in for race or ethnicity. Criticizing Islam is framed as an attack on “brown people”, Arabs, or “the Middle East”, as if Islam were a skin color rather than a doctrine.
This confusion is rooted in historical illiteracy. Western liberal media routinely collapses entire civilizations into a single stereotype: “all Middle Easterners are Arabs”, “all Arabs are Muslim”, and “all Muslims are a monolithic, oppressed identity group by white European colonizers”. Iranians disappear entirely in this framework. Their language, history, and culture — Persian, not Arab; ancient, not colonial; distinct, not interchangeable — are erased.
By treating Islam as a racial identity rather than an ideology, Western media strips millions of people of their ability to reject it. Iranian protesters become unintelligible. Their rebellion cannot be processed without breaking the rule that Islam must not be criticized. So instead of listening to Iranians, the media speaks over them — or ignores them entirely.
There is another reason the Iranian uprising is so threatening to Western media is economic issues.
As you know, Iran is not only a religious dictatorship. It is a centrally controlled, state-dominated economy where markets are strangled, private enterprise is criminalized or co-opted, and economic survival depends on proximity to political power. Decades of price controls, subsidies, nationalization, and bureaucratic micromanagement have obliterated the middle class and entrenched corruption as the only functional system. The result is not equality or justice. It is poverty, stagnation, and dependence on government’s dark void of empty promises.
Covering Iran honestly would require acknowledging that these policies are harmful. They have been tried. They have failed. Catastrophically.
This is deeply inconvenient for Western media institutions that routinely promote expansive state control, centralized economic planning, and technocratic governance as morally enlightened alternatives to liberal capitalism. Iran demonstrates where such systems lead when insulated from accountability and enforced by ideology. It shows that when the state controls livelihoods, non-conformity becomes existentially dangerous. That lesson cannot be acknowledged without undermining the moral authority of those who advocate similar ideas in softer language.
Western liberal media prefers not to hear this. Acknowledging it would require abandoning the lazy moral categories that dominate modern discourse: oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, white and non-white. Iranian protesters do not fit. They show that authoritarianism is not a Western invention imposed from outside, but something many societies are actively trying to escape.
That is what terrifies Western liberal media. And that is why the Iranian people are being ignored.
So the silence continues.
On Substack Notes, Fergus Mason shares what might be the most iconic photo of the young year:
Update, 12 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
